Who is funding extreme political candidates in Texas?

Ever wonder where the funding comes from for increasingly extreme political candidates?

A new article from ProPublica and NY Times Magazine highlights a key source: billionaire oil magnates and preachers named Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks.

Since 2000, Dunn and Wilks have dominated political funding in our state. Tim Dunn and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Farris Wilks and his wife have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, totaling $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided a full two thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.

“Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.”

“Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think-tanks, media organizations, political-action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”

Read more: A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start. (NYT / ProPublica, October 2, 2024)

What does this have to do with schools?

Wilks and Dunn are not just donating to Governor, AG and Senate races.

In fact, Texas Tribune reports that in the 2022 election cycle, their Defend Texas Liberty PAC made donations ranging from $4,000 to $18,000 to extreme candidates in Spring Branch ISD and Round Rock ISD.  

Read more: Here’s who gets money from Defend Texas Liberty, the PAC whose leader met with white supremacist Nick Fuentes (Texas Tribune, October 12, 2023)

Why would they do that?

CNN reports: “People who’ve worked with Wilks and Dunn say they share an ultimate goal: replacing much of public education in Texas with private Christian schools.”

“Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar, joined Farris Wilks on a 2015 Christian speaking tour organized by his brother-in-law and said she spoke at events he attended. Burton said that after a year of hearing Wilks’ ideology on the speaking circuit, she became disillusioned by the single-mindedness of his conservatism.”

“’The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,’ she said of Wilks. ‘And rebuild it the way God intended education to be.’”

“In sermons, Dunn and Wilks have advocated for religious influence in schooling. ‘When the Bible plainly teaches one thing and our culture teaches another, what do our children need to know what to do?’ Wilks asks in one sermon from 2013.”

Read more: How two Texas megadonors have turbocharged the state’s far-right shift (CNN, July 24 2022)

If that’s their objective and they’re already funding it at the state level and in nearby school districts, it’s worth watching out for them here.